


As Long As the Doctor Has His Sonic Screwdriver He Isn't Naked

by jer832



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Eventual Romance, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Gen, POV Rose Tyler, Sonic Screwdriver, The Scientific Method is Sexy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 05:10:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23859565
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jer832/pseuds/jer832
Summary: They get stripped, manacled, and thrown into impending death situations a lot. Rose has learned how to deal with it rationally and sensibly.
Relationships: Ninth Doctor & Rose Tyler, Ninth Doctor/Rose Tyler
Comments: 10
Kudos: 52





	As Long As the Doctor Has His Sonic Screwdriver He Isn't Naked

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by bloose09.
> 
> The pandemic has been with us for a while now. The plan was that I'd go to my daughter's after our 6-week self-quarantines that would let me travel between our closed states, and bake my birthday cake with my little girl and her little girl. That morning we decided that even the tiniest, most improbable possibility of getting and transmitting the virus, plus the fear and any guilt, wasn't worth it. So I spent my birthday at home writing this. 
> 
> I'm dedicating the story (and the poem I'll put in endnote if I have the guts and it fits) to my daughter Chaya Me'ira Masha; even though, or maybe because, she doesn't know anything about my AO3.

_"As Long as the Doctor Has His Sonic Screwdriver He Isn't Naked"_

The Doctor could be shackled and chained upside-down by his ankles, his jacket gone, the remnant of the rest of his clothing hanging in blood-soaked tatters over his flayed torso. Or bound up by his own jumper and hung by his wrists off a hook in the wall, his jacket gone, mud caked on his body everywhere, sweat and probably blood puddling in the hollows in his throat and above his clavicles, dripping a cold sticky trail down his torso into his denims. Or locked in stocks in the public square wearing only his pants, his skin brutalized first by 2nd degree sunburn and then by flogging with his own belt, his shoes and socks and the rest of his clothes gone, along with his jacket.

He could be any combination of _lesses_ — _jumper-less, shirt-less, jacket-less, shoe-less, sock-less, trouser-less, pants-les_ s — but as long as the Doctor has held on to his sonic screwdriver he would not be naked. He could even be stripped-down and completely — meaning _COMPLETELY_ — unclothed. But as long as he still somehow managed to keep his sonic, Rose was certain beyond words that he wouldn't be naked.

And that particular fact that she had held fast to really gave her something to think about after the twenty-first… no, twenty-second time they'd found themselves in big trouble and she was waiting for him to pull an escape out of his arse.

Right, yeah, it was the twenty-second.

They had been grabbed, knocked out, and taken to a soundproof sub-basement, where they were bound in chains and tightly secured to the raw stone walls. They had only been threatened at first, and the shackles weren't so bad as shackles go as long as she stayed absolutely motionless and didn't breathe too much while she waited for the Doctor to get them out. But then the sods started to torture the Doctor, smacking him bloody with a giant metal-webbing flyswatter thing that shot arcs of electric current out of the slits.

He had just stood up magnificently albeit figuratively to the head honcho. He stared the sod down and promised him in strangely fascinating detail what he would do when he escaped. And then he offered him and his despicable insurgent regime one more chance to free the legitimate government of Meerkha and accept a peace. The man answered the Doctor with a high voltage smack that made him scream then left the chamber.

The restraints were too constricting, too heavy, hurt too much to do much more than turn her head without the excruciating pain, but Rose could make out the Doctor's general form, which was frighteningly still. He looked to have collapsed off his wrist manacles, and his head lolled with his face against his far shoulder. His breathing was irregular and laboured. She tried _she did!_ to twist in the restraints to see him better; they didn't budge a millimetre, just tore at her clothes and her flesh even more. He didn't answer her when she called to him. So she raised her voice somewhat louder— _"Doctor, please answer me?!"_ — and maybe she shouted at him a few times.

"Shhh, Rose. They may still be out there."

"Doctor, are you all right?!"

" _Just peachy."_

"Doctor—" He twisted away from her, somehow, as tightly bound as his body was.

 _Peachy?_ After being shackled to a wall for hours and tortured and electrocuted? She loved the twit more than she'd ever thought a person could love, but she wasn't blinded by it. He was good and caring; he was brilliant but he was pig-headed and vain and could be a bit autocratic when he thought he was right. He had a dreadful habit of thinking he knew what was best for her and probably was hiding his injuries so she wouldn't worry. Biting her lip so she didn't make any telltale sound, she twisted fast and hard against the shackles until she could see him, then looked him over closely for the injuries she was sure she'd find. There was also something more than the torture wrong with him. His skin was deeply, unnaturally flushed, he was— _feverish_ her mum would say.

"Doctor, do you think you might have been poisoned or injected with some kind of virus synthesized to hurt Gallifreyans?" He mumbled something she couldn't make out. "Doctor, I can't understand you. Please look at me. Are you all right? I mean, considering."

The Doctor snorted against his armpit. "Cnsdrng weYr hngg a mtr aprt n daYve taYkn L miY cloze Roze?"

"Doctor I don't understand you. Can you lift your head and talk to me? What's wrong? Oh stars! You're too badly injured aren't you and I don't know how to get us out of here!"

"iYm fiYn n iYz jus… iYm… " The Doctor sighed and tilted his face off his armpit just enough to see and talk to her. "I'm fine, Rose. Give me… I just… I just need to… I need a moment to figure this all out. Then I'll get us down and unlock the door with the sonic."

"You five-fingered your sonic when you were scrapping with that guard didn't you!" Something shifted in the _Break-Out and Escape_ _with the Doctor_ section of her brain, and she smiled. "Let's get out of here! First thing, yeah— you need your jacket, don't you."

The Doctor chuckled loudly. "What do you think?"

His skin remained that two-too-many-days-on-holiday shade of _feverish_ all the way back to the TARDIS, but by then reality had long since checked in with Rose's brain and she knew that among all the other things he didn't have, which happened to include his clothing, he didn't have a fever.

But he had the sonic screwdriver. He had the sonic.

He didn't make a big deal over his injures or state of undress. But he just about threw a tantrum when they found his jacket in a bin and he saw that the Meerkhanes had ripped off all the pockets, which had permanently sealed the contents back in their various resting dimensions. He cleaned and sanitized the jacket with the sonic and had her wear it — it would do more to cover her than him, he said with a small shrug of his mouth and two hands covering his groin. They made their way back to the TARDIS together, but he didn't take her hand. She missed the comfort of the Doctor's touch, but from what she'd seen, he wouldn't have held her hand even if he had wanted to.

She was desperate to just chalk it up as one of those typically atypical experiences that running around with an alien in a little blue box brought; and once the Doctor completely healed and they freed the Prime Minster and her elected government, Rose wanted to forget the painful details of Meerkha's liberation. And she wanted to forget that she had seen the Doctor naked and more gorgeous than she'd ever imagined. Except… late at night in bed, when she couldn't sleep with wanting him and wished she could forget how definitely male he was, her heart kept asking her if she was sure she really wanted to.

~~~

Almost three weeks after they'd gone back and settled up with the insurgents, the Doctor still turned beet red every time he looked at her, which he didn't do as often as before or with the same open delight that it was indeed better with two. She gave it two more weeks, then she asked him to pick up their favourite chips and meet her in the kitchen. Then, over an approximation of their first meal together, she gave him her honest and open perspective on this situation between them… albeit one that didn't quite come out and say _I love being on the TARDIS, I love being with you and sharing your life as your plus-1. Because of that, and because you are so brilliant and gorgeous and fantastic and I want you so desperately and love you so deeply, I've trained myself to see you only as that sweet, kind, somewhat goofy asexual alien who saved my life and invited me into his. But to make it work, and be able to hold your hand and not jump you and not be driven sack of hammers with the constant arousal and frustration, I have to ignore you too, in a way. Especially when you're trying to break us out of some bad situation and save our lives._

"First off, Doctor, I have a picture of you, in my head—denim and leather and iceberg blue jumper—"

"Iceberg blue? I don't—"

"Regardless of what colour you actually have on; anyway, I start with that. I expect it in the morning. At breakfast sometimes I change the colour of your jumper, maybe imagine no jacket, since you've started leaving it on the coat rack."

"Rose, I don't understand."

"'Course you don't, it's a human thing. Otherwise I'd imagine that I'm, that you— Well you know us apes and our drives. But I've become very accomplished at— It's like the rubber bumper shields and brakes on a bumper car, y'know, so when I drive the course of being with you here I don't have a smash-up against all the obstacles, or the walls, or other bumper cars, or— So, sure, my human imagination has pictured you undressed— again, just a human ape thing, basic biology, follows a lunar clock— but the important thing to remember is that the part of my mind that's running things, my thinking brain, always puts your clothes back on."

"So you're saying I'm like a _Fantasy-Shag_ Ken doll?"

"But without the fantasy shag. Or any… other…kind of… shag," she hastily added and tried to grin.

"Why?"

"Why?"

"Why, Rose?"

She sighed. "Because it wouldn't do either of us any good more than the once _would it_ , if you're working hard to save our lives and you're doing all those _finding a way out_ contortions that make your bum, that is to say your-your posterior anatomy squirm and sway and-and— Honestly, Doctor, your jacket isn't as long as you think it is, and it's really supple too, so it doesn't take very much for it to when you and the trousers mold quite nicely which probably, at least in part, all the running." 

The Doctor looked at her as if she had been speaking some lost alien language the TARDIS couldn't translate. His eyes searched hers, two bolts of arctic blue sex fire boring deep into her skull, and she bloody _lost it_.

'So there is your gorgeous arse screaming at me to grab it, and your soft lips are so intent on the task and even more kissable than usual, and your agile tongue keeps poking out because you do that when you concentrate like-like you're thinking about tasting me— But you're fondling the screwdriver instead of my body and we're gonna be executed any minute but you're smiling at me with your eyes and your mouth and telling me how glad you are you met me...

"And right in the middle of your _just about out of time_ desperate escape attempt I suddenly jump you and throw you down and beg you to shag me!!"

The Doctor opened his mouth then shut it. He listened mutely with an unreadable expression and a light flush as she explained her failsafe method for dealing with things like the Meerkhanes taking his clothes and why he shouldn't get upset about it. By the time she was done talking, the Doctor wasn't blushing anymore. She was.

"Let me see if I get this, Rose. When you look at me when I'm wearing any of my clothing and I have my sonic you see a fully dressed Time Lord. But your imagination always wants to undress me— "

"Oi! Not all the time."

"Fair enough. Your imagination sometimes gets a little active while you're waiting for me to come up with an escape plan, and because escaping almost always involves using my sonic to break us out of trouble, you've conditioned your mind to sit on your imagination whenever you see me working with it, so that you don't fantasize about us.

"Furthermore, you have trained yourself to pinpoint the sonic in life-or-death situations and utilize it as a trigger mechanism for your thinking brain, as you call the reasoning part of your mind, to remain in control, which is impressive. To your mind I am fully clothed and not a possible sexual distraction—"

"Wish it were only sexual," Rose mumbled to herself.

"—from the job of surviving. That's logical, efficient, and ingenious, and it's very complicated to accomplish; and I am impressed, Rose Tyler, I am tremendously impressed! When you looked at me, you actually saw me fully clothed?"

She nodded.

"When did you notice I was starkers?"

"When I was checking your injuries."

"I see. When you look at me and I don't have my sonic, what I'm wearing doesn't matter. Only under that very specific sonic-coded condition the highly imaginative part of your mind is allowed to envision me unclothed. You see me totally in my altogether."

He grinned. "Back in that Meerkhane prison, when I told you I had my sonic after you'd just seen me, I bet your brain must have had to beat your imagination into a bloody pulp."

"Right now my brain and my imagination are in agreement that you're walking a very fine line of humour here, Doctor, and you are not as impressive as you think you are."

"That brings up another possibility— Can your brain and your imagination ever come to a compromise? For example, have you ever imagined me in just my leather jacket and the sonic?" The Doctor's eyes went wide as Rose's face discovered shades of red beyond the human visible spectrum.

"I presume your imagination has been working with a representation of a generic unclothed humanoid male that you identify as 'naked Doctor'."

"Yeah, until. . . But I uh, I'm working on fixing that so it's not... I don't, l, you aren't actually... I'm working on it."

"I see. Thank you, Rose."

"You're welcome."

"Let me know how well that turns out. I'd like to incorporate all your relevant data into a treatise I've been working on over the past few hundred years. "A Psychological Study of Humans in the Age of Alien Interaction."

"Uh, sure . . .?" Was he having her on?

"One thing more. When we're safe in the TARDIS and I have the sonic with me, am I clothed or naked? What about when I don't have it?"

She didn't have a decent answer for that, although a lot of indecent ones helpfully popped into her head. So she channelled the Doctor and put on her best _seriously considering it_ face. "Hmm. The _Safe-in-the-TARDIS_ scenario. When we aren't hours if not minutes away from a horrible death, you don't need the screwdriver to save us, you don't need to pull it out and brandish it. So I can't actually see that you have it. But I expect that it is in your pocket waiting to be needed. Like the cat."

"Schrodinger's cat?"

"That one."

"What you're saying is, my state of dress is determined by what you perceive to be the most likely possible spatio-temporal identity of my sonic screwdriver?"

"Sure." She smiled with a hint of tongue through her teeth. "Schrodinger's Screwdriver." And she got the hell out of there.

Neither of them brought it up again. Like the cat, it was better left in the box.

~~~

After their little talk, though, things did finally start to go back to normal between them. Rose still had the odd mini nervous breakdown about losing it so completely and blabbing most of the truth. She didn't half wonder what the Doctor thought, but she was grateful that she'd stopped her mouth before it admitted how much she loved him and that was why wanting him hurt so much. His last question really bothered her, though. She made sure he never caught her looking at him as if she were checking whether or not he had the sonic.

The Doctor made a point of taking out the sonic to work out some new functions, popping corn for example —it was not one of his greatest ideas— and to turn off all the inside lights _after_ they left, " _so the TARDIS won't feel like the maid_ ". He might have started cleaning it more than usual as well. And there was definitely some brandishing pure and simple. He didn't need to try to catch her eye to watch her expression change; she made the eye-roll very clear.

One morning, a couple of days after Rose asked him how much longer did he think it would be until he found a new game, the Doctor knocked on her door.

"I thought we were staying in today so you could fix the whatchamacallit? " she asked as she opened the door. He was freshly showered and fully dressed for the day, from black leather jacket to heavy-duty fast-escape boots.

"I'm still planning to. I just wanted to ask you about something."

"Sure."

"Maybe two things, it might depend. First off, Rose—"

First off would be the sonic screwdriver. She ignored herself, looked up at him, and raised her eyebrows. "First off?"

The Doctor gave her a look that was just shy of his _Oi we're in trouble no_ w, _Rose Tyler_ one— missing was the mad grin that would cover most of the bottom bit of his face.

He took his screwdriver out of his pocket, very deliberately set it down on a table near her door, and then moved to push her jaw back into place and cup her cheek.

"And second. Rose, may I come in?"


End file.
